The story of my first ride without training wheels came up recently despite that I’m nearly thirty. I don’t remember why, exactly, or why that moment has stuck with me over the decades. Maybe it’s because I’m a bike mechanic, too poor to let someone else fix my bike for so many years that I can tell you if that nut needs a nine-millimetre wrench before my greasy hand even touches the cold smooth metal, or maybe it’s because, of all the moments in my childhood that teetered between awful and okay, I still haven’t decided if this was one of the not-so-bad ones.
It started with some pointed questions and mockingly raised eyebrows when my classmates wanted to know why I still used training wheels in grade two, and I wanted to know the same, because even then I biked to school every day and they didn’t. Even then I had learned that my parents would never be there to get me anywhere, and biking was much faster for my short legs.
When I realized that my training wheels were on so low that they touched the ground even when I was balanced perfectly, I told my parents. They didn’t, however, choose to believe me for days or weeks until we had biked to a place called Uphill—a crossroads in the country at the top of the largest, steepest hill I had ever seen, twisting down into the trees for hundreds of metres like the burred tongue of a great beast.
You said you didn’t need them, my mother pointed out as my training wheels were removed, and I couldn’t argue back.
And maybe an older me hovering beside us that day would have pointed out that my parents were jerks. That they had been prodding at my embarrassment about still using training wheels as they had prodded at all of my other weakness, teaching me that failure and learning and mistakes were all things to be ashamed of and hidden until I could present a flawless exterior to the world like some perfect glimmering sculpture of steel, catching the sun just so until all anyone could see was the light.
Maybe they would have pointed out that that moment had the feeling of a stupid teenaged dare, a challenge arranged so I would fail before I’d even started.
My parents went first.
That, too, was telling. That too was part of the dare. Come with us if you can; if you’re good enough.
I kicked off after them like I were cresting the first hill of a roller coaster.
I remember the important thing, as far as defending myself is concerned. I remember that I didn’t fall the whole way down, and that then, my parents believed me. But I also remember how everything sharpened into crystal clarity as I biked down, recall that the moment ended simply by fading back into the haze of my childhood, back into the darkness and the apathy, the abuse and the neglect, the silence and the screaming.
Perhaps this memory remains with me because I was afraid, and fear etches its fingerprints into our minds in a way that little else does, but then, there were far scarier moments for me to remember.
Perhaps I remember that moment because it was one of the few times I could prove my parents wrong, one of the few times I had them admit that I was right about myself and my capabilities, and that their failures were not because of my own.
Or perhaps I remember because it is a moment that reminds me of who I was even then: someone whose parents left them at the top of a winding hill that could have killed them and didn’t look back. Someone who then rode down alone, and survived.
Because in the gallery of my life, that child’s victory was like an apprentice’s rough blueprint for a masterpiece they would one day create, the grade-two version of the horrifying hill of abuse and neglect and cruelty that I would careen down for the next fifteen years until its dust had worn its way into my flesh alongside the scars. Again, I wouldn’t quite crash going down, wouldn’t quite forget the truth through my parents’ gaslighting, before I pulled over at the bottom. Again, at the age of twenty-four and already a veteran of too many wars, I would unhook a set of training wheels that I had only thought I had needed: the parents holding me back from a life of goodness, love and joy.
Perhaps that ride remains with me because therein lay a clue, a path, a thread that led from that moment of relief and fear and anger and pride to the moment that I cut off ties with my parents, the moment when the wind of freedom and possibility blew through my storm-tossed hair and I pedalled off and away, my broken heart full to bursting with gratitude.
Balanced—perfectly—on two wheels.